"Double cheeseburger. Bacon. Fries. And a glass of wine."
Despite everything, despite the exhaustion and the fear and the purple stains on my hands, I felt something warm flicker in my chest. He knew me. He paid attention to the small things, even amid everything else.
"Thank you," I said. And I meant it for more than the food.
He nodded, understanding. "Fifteen minutes. I'll be watching."
The recovery suite was quiet, lit by the soft glow of monitoring equipment. Kaedren lay in the nearest bed, connected to machines that tracked his heartbeat, his breathing, and his blood oxygen levels. His face was pale, his chest wrapped in bandages, but he was alive. The monitors proved it with every steady beep.
I stood at the foot of his bed, not touching him, not speaking, just looking.
Through the tether, I could feel him. Distant and muted, like a voice heard through deep water. He was in there somewhere, fighting his way back.
The door opened behind me, and I felt Torvyn's presence before I turned. He stepped up beside me, followed a moment later by Vaelix, who looked marginally better after what must have been a brief rest. Lyrin remained in the doorway, keeping watch.
None of them spoke. None of them needed to.
We stood there together, the four of us, watching over the fifth. The mission had cost us. It would cost us more before it was over. But standing in that room, surrounded by the men who had chosen to walk this path with me, I understood something I hadn't fully grasped before.
The burden hadn't disappeared. It never would. But it had shifted, redistributed across shoulders stronger than mine alone. I didn't have to carry it by myself. I never had.
The monitors beeped steadily. Kaedren's chest rose and fell. Outside the recovery suite, the Starbreaker hummed with the quiet energy of a ship holding its breath, waiting to see what came next.
Chapter 12
I stood, exhausted, in the secondary medical bay. A week had passed since the mission where I got Kaedren hurt, and the Starbreaker was still limping along, trying to recover fully from what happened.
I moved between cots, handing Lyrin supplies before he asked for them:gauze, analgesic patches, the small silver tool he used to check healing tissue. We'd developed a rhythm over the past three days, ever since I'd shown up at the ward entrance and asked if there was something I could do.
He hadn't questioned why. Hadn't offered reassurance or told me I didn't need to be here. He'd simply handed me a tray and pointed to the supply cabinet.
The patients in this ward weren't critically wounded. These were the injuries that would heal, eventually. Burn treatments that required daily dressing changes. Fractured bones knitting back together. Internal bruising that made breathing painful but not dangerous. The kind of damage that left people lying awake at night, painful enough to keep them up, but not enough to require drugs.
Mine, specifically. My choices.
I paused at the cot of a refugee from the first raid, whom corporate forces had beaten before we got there. She was sleeping now, her face slack with the peace of medicated rest. The bandage across her shoulder needed to be changed in two hours. I made a mental note, then moved on.
Kaedren was still in the recovery suite, unconscious. I knew because I checked the status updates Lyrin sent me every morning, before coming here. The information never changed: stable but unresponsive. The words had started to feel like a kind of holding pattern, a suspended sentence with no end in sight.
I couldn't sit with him. Not yet. Not when every time I looked at that bed, I saw the moment he'd fallen on that grenade. Thelife-changing choice he'd made because I'd been standing in the wrong place. At the wrong time.
So I came here instead. Where the work was slower, quieter, and utterly devoid of the dramatic interventions that might have let me feel like I was fixing something.
"Kira." Lyrin's voice cut through my thoughts. He was standing near the supply station, his silver-streaked hands sorting through medication vials with the kind of focused precision that made everything around him feel calmer. "We're due for a rotation break."
"I'm fine."
"I’m not,” he said, setting down the vials and turning to face me fully. His eyes, that deep hazel that always seemed to see more than was being shown, held mine without judgment. "I require sustenance and a brief period of not being responsible for anyone's well-being. You may accompany me or continue pretending this ward cannot function without you for fifteen minutes."
Despite everything, I almost smiled. "That sounded suspiciously like an order."
"An observation. Orders are Torvyn's domain." He gestured toward the small alcove at the back of the ward, a space with two chairs, a narrow table, a coffee machine, and a viewport that looked out at nothing but stars. "Fifteen minutes. Then we return to the work."
The alcove was quiet. Lyrin poured us two cups of coffee, the good kind, with actual flavor profiles, and we drank in silence.
"Why medicine?" I asked, realizing it was a part of him that I didn’t know anything about.
Lyrin considered the question with the same careful attention he gave everything. "Because I wanted to help people." A pause. "That is the answer I gave when I was young. It was true, but incomplete."
